Trần Trọng Kim

Trần Trọng Kim (; chữ Hán: 陳仲金, Kanji pronunciation: Chin Jūkin; ; 1883 – December 2, 1953; courtesy name Lệ Thần (, chữ Hán: 隸臣) was a Vietnamese scholar and politician who served as the Prime Minister of the short-lived Empire of Vietnam, a state established with the support of Imperial Japan in 1945 after Japan had seized direct control of Vietnam from Vichy France toward the end of World War II. He was an uncle of Bùi Diễm.

Early years Kim was born in Nghi Xuân, Hà Tĩnh Province, in northern central Đại Nam (as Vietnam was known then) in 1883 during the Nguyen dynasty.

Nevertheless, the movement was crushed, and when Kim grew up, He then worked in the public service of the French administration. Kim's early career was as an interpreter, serving in Ninh Bình in northern Vietnam, then known as the protectorate of Tonkin. In 1905, Kim was sent to France as an employee of a private company. In 1908, he won a scholarship from the École Coloniale (Colonial School) to begin his training as a teacher at the École Normale of Melun (Seine-et-Marne). Kim returned to Vietnam in September 1911, commenced his career as a teacher in Annam and slowly rose in the educational hierarchy. By 1942, he had risen to become an inspector of elementary public instruction in Tonkin. He wrote many works on pedagogy and started a review on the topic.

Academia In contrast to his career as a politician, Kim was widely known as a scholar for a collection of textbooks published in the Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc Ngữ), especially for his writings on Confucianism, Buddhism and Vietnamese history. In the first book, Kim emphasised the Chinese influence on Vietnamese society. The latter book dealt with examining Confucianism in China and its impact on Vietnam. Kim strongly praised Confucianism, and his book provoked much intellectual debate on the philosophy's place in Vietnamese society. Nho giáo was seen as a link between the generations of scholars who were brought up under the Confucian examination system of pre-French Vietnam and those who grew up under the French system. Việt Nam Sử Lược remains in print as of 2009.

By now, the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 and the fall of Vichy France meant that Japan could no longer depend on the French colonial administration to co-operate. As a result, they assumed direct control of Indochina by deposing the French in a coup on March 9 and declared Vietnam to be independent under the newly created Empire of Vietnam with Bảo Đại, Vietnam's titular monarch, as its head of state. Japan however, maintained military control. Bảo Đại was then charged with selecting a prime minister and a cabinet. It was believed that Bảo Đại sent a message to Ngô Đình Diệm, who was then living under Japanese protection in Saigon, in asking him to form a government. However, the message never arrived, which was put down to Japanese concerns that Diệm would seek to govern independently, rather than toe the Japanese line.

Arriving in Saigon, he met with General Saburo Kawamura, Chief of Staff of the Japanese Indochina Garrison Army and Lieutenant Colonel Hayashi Hidezumi, Kawamura's chief of political affairs. Kawamura told Kim that he was one of the "notables" invited by Emperor Bảo Đại to consult in Huế on the creation of the new independent government. Kim's regime was quickly endorsed by the Đại Việt Quốc dân đảng and the Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội, two nationalist political parties.

The Phục quốc were connected to Phan Bội Châu and Cường Để,

Kim's actions have caused a debate as to whether he was a Japanese puppet. Milton Sacks and John T. McAlister regard him as such, but others, such as Trương Bửu Lâm, regard Kim and his cabinet as a group of apolitical technocrats.

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